A Historian Swandives into a Tank of Offal.

An historian named Andrew Roberts explains why he thinks Bush was a good President. 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/4241865/History-will-show-that-George-W-Bush-was-right.html

Let's admit, right at the start, that there was a lot of knee-jerk dislike of Bush throughout his presidency, even when what he did was, well, what Clinton or Gore or Kerry would have done. And I've never completely bought into the complaint that the case for WMDs was merely cooked up by the Bush administration; given what was known then, it would've been crazy to think that Saddam hussein had disarmed himself of those fabukous devices. The seeds of our current economic meltdown were planted by Bush's predecesors as far back as Reagan, and a lot of the damage of the past eight years could have been avoided if the Democrats had developed spines and integrity.

But this "historian's argument" rests on a lot of wishful thinking and willful avoidance. And it closes with a breathtaking display of dishonesty and amorality worthy of David Irving.

"At the time of 9/11, which will forever rightly be regarded as the defining moment of the presidency, history will look in vain for anyone predicting that the Americans murdered that day would be the very last ones to die at the hands of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists in the US from that day to this." 

What this means is anyone's guess. Of course nobody would _predict_ that-- it'd be like saying that there would be no more hurricanes after Katrina. But, let's acknowledge that we've had eight years without Islamic fundamentalists working destruction within our borders. We could say the same thing on September 10, 2001, which was about eight years afer the first WTC bombing in 1993. So this guy is saying that nobody would have made a wholly unreasonable prediction. And that we've been fortunate since. What does this mean? Nothing. 

As for the failure of the Bush administration to _prevent_ the attacks? Unmentioned. 

"The decisions taken by Mr Bush in the immediate aftermath of that ghastly moment will be pored over by historians for the rest of our lifetimes. One thing they will doubtless conclude is that the measures he took to lock down America's borders, scrutinise travellers to and from the United States, eavesdrop upon terrorist suspects, work closely with international intelligence agencies and take the war to the enemy has foiled dozens, perhaps scores of would-be murderous attacks on America. There are Americans alive today who would not be if it had not been for the passing of the Patriot Act. There are 3,000 people who would have died in the August 2005 airline conspiracy if it had not been for the superb inter-agency co-operation demanded by Bush after 9/11."

Nearly all of the measures Roberts mentions would have been enacted by any President after 9-11, so it's not as if Bush deserves exceptional credit. And given the failure of his administration to _prevent_ it, I think we'd be pretty pissed if he'd failed to do these things.

But Roberts lists these only as rough principles and safeguards and general policies. He doesn't address _how_ these were implemented. It's one thing to give, say, Boss Tweed credit for building municipal buildings in New York City, but it's dishonest to _not_ fault him for making millions on kickbacks and sweetheart deals to do it. And with Bush... well, as I said, all of the above was pretty much mandated by 9-11, but hiring cronies and incompetents to run those programs really _ought_ to be considered when evaluating Bush. 

"When Abu Ghraib is mentioned, history will remind us that it was the Bush Administration that imprisoned those responsible for the horrors."

You have got to be kidding me, Roberts. The lack of oversight at Abu Ghraib was _typical_ of the Administration's handling of the Iraq invasion. Also, despite evidence that high-ranking commanders were aware of what was going on 9and are thus complicit), the only people who've been imprisoned are low-ranking soldiers. 

"The credit crunch, brought on by the Democrats in Congress insisting upon home ownership for credit-unworthy people, will initially be blamed on Bush, but the perspective of time will show that the problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac started with the deregulation of the Clinton era."

Oh, there's more than enough blame to go around on the regulation of our economy. And Bush was as eager a participant as anyone else; there's a reason why he found Kenneth Lay such a congenial partner in energy policy. So this "everyone else was doing it" defense really doesn't wash. 

Now for the climax, where Roberts takes a swan dive into genuine corruption. I don't know if you know the name of David Irving, a British historian and Hitler enthusiast who's spent his career trying to exonerate the Third Reich from everything, up to and including the Holocaust. Here, in his penultimate paragraph, Andrew Roberts stands alongside of Irving, as far as ethics are concerned. 

"The number of American troops killed during the eight years of the War against Terror has been fewer than those slain capturing two islands in the Second World War, and in Britain we have lost fewer soldiers than on a normal weekend on the Western Front. As for civilians, there have been fewer Iraqis killed since the invasion than in 20 conflicts since the Second World War."

In order to defend George Bush, Roberts has to compare our modern war to the _most horrific battles of the past century_. He says that the war may be bad, but it's not as bad as, say, the Battle of Passchendaele? That the fighting's been less vicious than that on Iwo Jima? Well, _no shit_, Roberts. Those were wars against _whole countries_ and their organized war apparatuses, using very different technologies and tactics. The Vietnam conflict cost the U.S. roughly 60,000 men over twelve years-- would you defend that conflict because it's less than the hundreds of thousands killed at the Somme? Apparently, yes. 

And look at that last, rotten sentence about civilian deaths. "Fewer Iraqis killed... than in 20 conflicts since the Second World War." Is that so? The Iraqi war has fewer casualties than _twenty other wars combined_? Why, merciful heavens, I had no idea!

This does beg all kinds of questions. For example... why _twenty_ conflicts? Why not nineteen? Why not ten? Or even one? Or, Mr. Roberts, did you _have_ to go to twenty conflicts before you could exceed the Iraqi civilian death toll? 

Now, I don't know how many civilians were killed in the Iraq war so far. I suspect Roberts does, because he's the one who had to go all the way up to _twenty_ to beat it. Maybe he cherry-picked his twenty, selecting wars with low body counts. 

I'd be interested to know if Roberts included Vietnam among his "twenty conflicts." It's the first one we Americans think of, when it comes to invading third-world nations and establishing governments. And in that war, in addition to the 50-60,000 American casualties, between three and four million Vietnamese were killed. Which leaves Andrew Roberts with a real problem.

If Andrew Roberts cherry picked his "twenty conflicts," then he's clearly done this to skew his argument, which makes him unscrupulous. But, if he _did_ include Vietnam in his tally... he's effectively saying that Iraqi civilian casualties have exceeded four million people. 

I don't think even the war's opponents have seriously suggested a casualty number this high. And Andrew Roberts is offering this as a _defense_ of George Bush.

Today and Tomorrow

Last night, I had a long conversation with my friend P about a whole lotta things-- race, Obama, our respective upbringings, and all of the marvelously complex issues and values and anxieties and history that have come to this great moment. P and I go back at least two decades, and we can say stuff to each other that we don't necessarily share with anyone else. It's been a great friendship, and we share this stuff on at least two planes. Basically, our sense of humor is similar, we think about things in a similar way, and I think we understand each other on a good, basic level as well. 

One of the things we can talk about is when our own feelings, and opinions, don't exactly match the common wisdom. Or even the better nature that we'd like to present to the world. So we talked about what January 2009 means to us. 

I hate to say that I grew up in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, but I did spend almost all of my pre-twenties there. And for most of that time, black people were pretty rare in my neighborhood. Cherry Hill was a place where a lot of people moved to get away from cities. And if you look at the immigrant paths as a kind of filtration system, you have huge ethnic enclaves in the cities, and the more succesful generations move out to the burbs... as a result, the only prominent ethnic group in Cherry Hill was Jewish. Other than that, it was a homogenized a mix of Christian Europeans. 

I don't know how this sounds to y'all-- after all, the above description is usually associated with xenophobic grated communities. But I don't remember any sense of ethnic rivalry or hatreds or tribalism. Most of the diversity was in last names, so there wasn't anything to develop a grudge over. There were occasions where I'd hear one of my parents drop a racial or religious epithet, but those were pretty rare (or, in the case of my mom, when she started getting more demented over the years). 

Now, let me take you back to a fascinating time in this country's cultural history, the early 1970s, when the people who made the culture took a big interest in incorporating black America in its content, and made confronting prejudice and bigotry a big priority. Sure, Cherry Hill was an affluent, off-white slurry, but we did have newspapers and television and radio and movies, and a pre-teenage kid like me could receive signals about what was going on in the world. It could be a show like _All in the Family_. A TV movie called _Attack on Terror: The FBI vs. the Ku Klux Klan_. The presence of Stevie Wonder on the radio playlists. Reverence for Jimi Hendrix. I was home sick when _Sesame Street_ went on the air, maybe six or seven years old, and the idea that a kids' show was populated mostly by black people was _pretty fuckin' interesting_: it gave the show a fascinating exoticism. On the low-end, there were those Norman Lear sitcoms like _The Jeffersons__, _Sanford and Son_, and _Good Times_, and even then I got an ugly sense that Jimme Walker as "J.J." was a bad joke in so many ways. And later on, there was _Roots_, which dovetailed with the stuff we were learning in school about slavery. (And later than _that_, my high school library got me access to books like _The Autobiography of Malcolm X_, _Letters from a Birmingham Jail_, _Soul on Ice_ and many others.) 

This period of liberal cultural improvement-- and yeah, it was a period when liberals really did run the culture-- ran on two very appealing tracks. The first, the stated reason, was the desire to create culture that was both relevant and improving the country by reducing prejudice and exposing bigotry. The second may not have been conscious; it was that association with being black with being hip, that desire of many whites to be in touch with something more real, more vital, more creative and even vaguely dangerous, which they saw in black culture. It's been a constant in American culture for more than a century, and everyone from Stanley Crouch to Norman Mailer has addressed it in some way or another. And part of this cultural constant is this: to be regarded as an intelligent person, you have to be hip in some way or another, and this means not merely being aware of black culture, but immersed in it.

(Okay, maybe this is a little too much in the distant past for y'all. But do you remember when gay rights caught on as a civil-rights issue in the mid-1980s? It wans't enough to simply support the rights of gay men and women and to want to see an end to anti-gay laws and violence. One was also expected to develop a sense of gays and lesbians in culture; to catch jokes once hidden, to know who was and who wasn't gay. In other words, to be demonstrably hip to certain things.) 

(This begs an interesting question. Does a particular civil rights cause gain support because the oppressed minority offers some degree of coolness?) 

Years later, I realized this created a catch-22 where the two tracks crossed. Look at this from the perspective of a white kid in a mostly liberal-white community. On the one hand, you're told that you really ought to know a lot about black America. You have to know what slavery was, what Jim Crow was, what poverty was, what prejudice was and how it creates poverty and misery and crime. You have to remember that black people's experience of America isn't like yours, and that you have to keep this in mind because otherwise you might fall into idiotic prejudice, or offend or insult someone. That's all fine and wonderful. But, you're also supposed to know that a person without prejudices would deal with people of different backgrounds in a relaxed and mutually appreciative manner. You wouldn't _care_ what a person's ethnic background was beyond the appreciation of interesting differences. That's what a really _together_ person would be like. 

So you can see the catch-22. It says black people are both _no_ different and _very_ different than we were. You must be sensitive and keep the differences in mind, but you must not give in to _prejudices_, i.e., thinking they're different. 

There's an added bit of damage that comes from matters of hipness and merely Looking Cool... if you have to make an effort to understand another culture, that just marks you as being terminally un-hip. So all the stuff I mentioned above, like reading Malcolm X and watching _Roots_... well, isn't that just another example of how terminally un-hip white people try to grasp things beyond their racial understanding? It really does discourage you from asking honest questions, because you risk looking like a doofus. 

When I was talking to P about this, I told him a story about one of my first trips to New York City. I'd saved up money to buy a movie camera, and conned my mom into taking me to one of their legendarily cheap camera stores to get it at a good price. The store was run by Hasidic Jews-- first time I've ever met any Hasids, actually-- and while I'm watching the guy behind the counter turn Nikon lenses over, I notice the numbers tattooed on his arm. It was one of those genuine _Holy Shit_ moments, followed by two other thoughts. The first was that I was _not_ going to ask about it. The second was a silent prayer that my Mom wouldn't say anything about it, either.

That's not a bad default setting for interactions with other subcultures, I guess: you just try to put all of that stuff out of your mind, and behave reasonably politely and be friendly. Which is probably why a kind of universalist humanism seems both desirable and terminally uncool; it's a set of rules for people who aren't instinctively cool. It's what you hope society could be, but since you have to _think_ your way to it, and establish rules and principles, it's not exactly an exciting world of thrills and adventure. Heck, you could have an encyclopedic knowledge of black America from Crispus Attucks on down, you could tell W.E.B. duBois from Marcus Garvey from Booker T. Washington, you might know who Cheney and Schwerner and Goodman were... but to most people, that's just academic shit that's got nothing to do with what's _real_.

I grew up with a fair amount of these low-level anxieties, but they were just part and parcel of the anxieties I have with people in general. It's mainly a severe self-consciousness, of continually worrying about whether one's continual worrying is putting others off. After a while, the anxieties slough off because they require just too much energy to maintain. 

But given the way I grew up, and the values I absorbed, it was frustrating to _not_ get past these anxieties... and to watch others be more at ease with most of these things. I have no idea if everyone else felt the need to _work_ at being a decent person. But it's clear that younger people are far more at ease with different cultures. No matter how much work I put into _myself_, it hasn't been as effective as, say, being born ten or fifteen years later. You feel like someone who got a _touch_ of polio, worked hard to get to where you could walk and run and maybe dance a little, and then Salk and Sabin come along and toss polio into the dustbin of history. 

Which isn't a horrible metaphor for tomorrow. I don't like those metaphors of big steps, marks of progress, crossing divides, and the like, because they all imply a distance that's clear and distinct. (And there's just too much self-congratulation there, too. I like people giving out head-pats to feel better about themselves.) But tomorrow, we start moving a _lot_ of awful, deforming bullshit into our past.

Not enough words about Donald E. Westlake

Donald E. Westlake died on New Year's Eve, and I'm very sad about this.

Donald Westlake was a terrific writer, and if you pay any attention to crime fiction his name glimmers like platinum because, alongside of Elmore Leonard and Lawrence Block, he was one of the Great Living Old Pros. Maybe some of you have read Carl Hiassen's comic crime novels, and enjoyed them. They're fun, but look, take my word for it, _Donald E. Westlake_ is the master, and if you don't read him you are depriving yourself. 

Westlake wrote more than a hundred books, none of them bad, and some were juist brimming with tight, complex plotting, complex characters, and some of the nimblest writing since P.G. Wodehouse. I used to say that the Dortmunder novels were sort of crime fiction's P.G. Wodehouse, but this shortchanges Westlake-- who also came up with some of the grimmest novels around.

His finest novel may have been _The Ax_. The main character's a middle-aged paper mill manager who's been downsized out of a job. He hasn't been able to tell his wife. He leaves home in the morning, scans the want ads, occasionally getting interviews that go nowhere. He's been living on savings that are quickly running out. Westlake makes the man's desperation as deep and vivid as a paper cut. So when he outlines the scheme to get his career back, you're shocked at its evident brilliance, and even more appalled that he'll go through with it. 

Or, if you don't want to hunt down _The Ax_, rent _The Stepfather_, which is one of those low-budget thrillers that stands out as a real gem of the form. (Ignore the sequels.) Westlake wrote this as a favor to producer Brian Garfield, and the nature of the deal was that they couldn't change the script without Westlake's consent. And luckily enough, they hired an unknown actor named Terry O'Quinn to play the lead, and he was _perfect_. (It reminds me of another thriller worth checking out: _The Silent Partner_, with Elliott Gould and Christopher Plummer.)

How about something lighter? Track down _Kahawa_, an amazing crime story where the thieves go after a multi-ton trainload of Ugandan coffee. It's been years since I read this one (and maybe I oughta get a hardcover), but the characters include mercenaries, diplomats, villagers, assorted black-marketeers, and Idi Amin Dada. 

Or for a REAL comic romp, check out 1977's _Dancing Aztecs_, which is one of the greatest comic novels ever written, Westlake's his version of those epic comedies like _It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World_. Ready for the set-up? Here it is. A stolen gold statue has been smuggled into New York with sixteen plaster copies. Due to a mix-up, the statues have been given to the members of a citywide activist organization. So the crooks have to track them all down to find the real statue. BUT, while the crooks hunt all over Manhattan and its environs to find and break the plaster statues, a marriage among the activists breaks up, one of the crooks falls in love with one of the statue-owners, more and more people become aware of the gold statue and horn in on the chase, and a funeral director has to stage-manage a parade in Harlem full of the worst celebrity lookalikes he can hire. And two thirds into the novel, when we're down to the last statue, Westlake makes us SCREAM when he casually informs us that it's a fake, too. "Someone has made a mistake." 

But let's get to the two names that Westlake's known for, Parker and Dortmunder, who would be those masks of Tragedy and Comedy, except that Dortmunder could be _both_ of them and Parker really can't be either of them, so maybe they're not the masks of Comedy and Tragedy after all. (Yes, I cribbed that gag from Westlake.) 

Parker is an expert thief. He's not a dinner-jacket sophisticate, like Cary Grant in a Hitchcock movie. Parker is as ruthless and bone-dry as a bison skull in the desert. He evaluates a robbery, makes his decisions, lines up a crew (or ir recruited), and goes at it. But, life being as it is, complications ensue. Maybe part of his crew's just unreliable. Maybe the mark has his own agenda. But Parker manages to survive these treacheries, and once in a while, he comes out ahead. In the movies, Parker's turned up as Mel Gibson in _Payback_, Robert Duvall in _The Outfit_, Peter Coyote in _Slayground_, and even Jim Brown in _The Split_, but Lee Marvin was absolutely perfect in _Point Blank_. So think Lee Marvin. 

The funny thing is, the Parker novels were marketed as a numbered-series set of paperbacks, but they're actually very experimental. In most of the Parker novels, Westlake will bring us up to some excruciatingly suspenseful point... and on th next page, he'll double back a day or two earlier with another character's backstory. Quentin Tarantino, a Westlake fan, did the same thing in most of his movies (and yeah, _Reservoir Dogs_ feels like a Parker novel). Westlake spun one of the secondary characters into a short series of novels on his own, where actor-thief Alan Grofield took center stage... and there's a Grofield book and a Parker novel that begin with the exact same chapter. 

Dortmunder, on the other hand, got his start as Parker. Westlake began a Parker novel with the idea that Parker'd have to steal the same gem over and over, but it kept coming out funny. So Westlake came up with a different band of thieves. There's John Dortmunder, the expert planner with the world's worst luck. His crew usually includes eager-to-please buddy Andy Kelp, driver Stan Murch, mountain of fear Tiny Bulcher, and a handful other equally strange small-time crooks. The best Dortmunder film was _The Hot Rock_, and even though people felt Robert Redford was too glamorous to play the hangdog Dortmunder, I thought he was fine (and George Segal was perfect as Kelp). But Westlake once said that Harry Dean Stanton would have been a perfect Dortmunder. 

If you've read a P.G. Wodehouse novel, like _The Code of the Woosters_, you may remember how the plot kept getting more complicated, and how Bertie and Jeeves would find themselves in greater and greater trouble. That's how Dortmunder's jobs go. In _Why Me_, Dortmunder's pulling a simple jewelry-store robbery, and almost by accident he acquires a national-symbol-grade ruby called the Byzantine Fire. So the cops are after him, the FBI's after him, several terrorist groups are after him, and since they're getting rousted by the cops the city's _criminals_ are after him. Or in the short story "Too Many Crooks," which could be the funniest crime story ever written, Dortmunder and Kelp drill into a bank vault and find themselves held hostage by _another_ team of bank robbers. The plots wind up tighter and tighter, and with every twist you're laughing because you can't _believe_ Westlake would _do_ that to his hero. 

Recurring gags, motifs, characters and situations abound, and a series just doesn't work as comfort food without things that _always_ happen or places we _always_ visit. The meetings at the O.J. Bar and Grill are always accompanied by notes on the decor, the "our own brand" bourbon, the signs on the bathrooms, and the hilariously inane arguments of the regulars in the bar. Andy Kelp's an enthusiast for nearly anything, especially electronic gadgetry, and when he steals cars it's always a doctor's Cadillac. Tiny Bulcher, "a monster brought to life by Claymation," terrifies everyone by sitting still. Stan Murch always has a new driving route through Manhattan. Fence Arnie Albright dwells on how detestable he is to his fellow man, but he make sup for it by giving better dollar than that other guy, Stoon. 

There's lots of play in the Dortmunder books too. In _Jimmy the Kid_, Kelp reads a novel that describes a kidnapping in perfect, plausible detail, so he convinces Dortmunder into following its blueprint. The book Kelp finds is _Child Heist_ by one Richard Stark, about a thief named Parker. In _Drowned Hopes_, the Caddie that Kelp's stolen gets reposessed by Ken Levine... a character from Joe Gores's novels. And the same scene turns up, written from Levine's viewpoint, in Gores's novel _32 Cadillacs_. 

The villian of _Drowned Hopes_ is an evil, grizzled, mean-spirited psychopath named "Tom Jimson," which is a great name in itself (as in jimson weed). But it's even more perfect when you recall that Westlake nearly won an Oscar for writing the script for _The Grifters_, from a novel by Jim Thompson. (Fun fact: director Stephen Frears asked Westlake to write the script under the Richard Stark pen name.).

There's just too much of Westlake to cover here. He created the Father Dowling mysteries. He did a nice "Starship Hopeful" series of funny science fiction storis for _Playboy_. He did a biography of Elizabeth Taylor under a pseudonym. He did a couple of mystery weekends with the likes of Gahan Wilson and Stephen King and Peter Straub. He did a good science fiction novel, _Anarchaos_, under the name Curt Clark. He did several series of novels under other pseudonyms, including some 1950s porn novels co-written with Lawerence Block to pay the bills. He did a book about the 1967 rebellion in Anguilla, a tiny Caribbean island whose people revolted _against_ independence and _for_ staying a colony of Great Britain... and Britain sent an invasion force to _put down the rebellion_. This was, other than the Liz Taylor job, Donald Westlake's only _non-fiction_ book. 

This April, Westlake's last novel-- one last Dortmunder, titled _Get Real_-- will be published. 

So, have I given you any incentive to read this wonderful, absolutely wonderful writer?

Happy New Year. Let's talk about the Holocaust.

(Note: Yes, I'm reposting stuff from my old LiveJournal blog.) 

A friend sent me the following item from _The Guardian_. 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jan/03/kubrick-holocaust-installation-wilson-southbank

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Stanley Kubrick worked on an adaptation of Louis Begley's novel _Wartime Lies_. The story was of a young Jewish woman who managed to maneuver herself and her son through wartime Poland, posing as non-Jews. The working title Kubrick used as _Aryan Papers_. Although Kubrick had cast a lead and explored locations in Czechoslovakia, he decided to not make the film. Two art students have been given access to the Kubrick Archivs to develop a presentation of Kubrick's material on the subject. 

Excerpt: "Kubrick put an awful lot of effort into Aryan Papers: writing the screenplay, casting Ter Steege and travelling to the Czech town of Brno as a possible location for wartime Warsaw. That the film was never made seems to be due to a combination of factors. Spielberg's Schindler's List came out in 1993 and Kubrick may have felt beaten to the line. He may also have got sidetracked by his project to make the film AI – which Spielberg ended up making after Kubrick's death."

I can certainly see _that_.

There was piece at _Slate_ this December about how the basic approaches the film industry takes for the Holocaust. It's at http://www.slate.com/id/2207553/, but the basics are: Good but conflicted Germans, Jews who fought back, postwar justice, the lingering scars of the survivors, and Fables. There are some great films among nearly all of these, but it's really easy to simply ride with one of these and wind up with a conventional and not very compelling movie.

It seems to me that if you want to create a work of art that contains the Holocaust, in some kind of essential way, you're going to create something that stresses _hopelessness_. You're addressing the mass murder of millions, and there's no real guarantee that it won't happen again, and otherwise decent people were made complicit in it... well, where's the hope and uplift and moral lesson? There's not a lot there. If you're realistic about life and art, you can't even delude yourself into thinking that your work of art about the Holocaust art is likely to change anything or prevent another one. Picasso's _Guernica_ might inspire our respect, but it didn't give Hitler or Franco or Curtis leMay any second thoughts about bombing cities.

And this is _before_ you start thinking about the marketing campaigns and box-office potential. I would have loved to see what Kubrick would have created from _Wartime Lies_. But if he decided that it couldn't be done or that he couldn't bring himself to do it, I understand.

I think Spielberg once said something about the awful sensation of directing crowds of naked, shivering inmates on _Schindler's List_, and feeling a bit like a Nazi commandant. (That's one thing I like about Spielberg: he's actually very candid when he talks about his work.) Which-- thinking of Terry Southern's _Blue Movie_-- makes me wonder if a funny movie can be made about a filmmaker doing a Holocaust movie and trying to "get it right." Sure, it could be a comedy like _Tropic Thunder_, but there's the potential for something really disturbing there.

"Making people laugh is the lowest form of humor."

The aphorism above was one of Michael O'Donoghue's, and I love it. Most people probably react quizzically, wondering why humor should do anything _but_ make people laugh. Others pick up on the fact that the aphorism's saying something _else_, but they're really not sure what, so there's a nervousness behind the dutifully-appreciative chuckle. 

But some of us love _black_ humor, where laughs can be found in some of the most horrible things imaginable. Most of us remember those sick jokes form childhood, the ones about using pitchforks to load truckloads of babies or the colors of nuns in blenders. They're _okay_. And over the past thirty years or so, we've enjoyed movies and TV shows and comic books that give death and mayhem a happy, comical spin, ranging from _Buffy_'s wisecracks to the whimsy of _Pushing Daisies_. Again, it's okay. 

But black humor's something deeper. It's a really aggressive comedy which confronts us with something truly _horrible_, but there's a detail or a description or a fact that makes you laugh _against your will_. It's extremely difficult to accomplish beyond a single joke, because if you dwell _too_ much in the Land of the Dead, the humor burns out and your audience just wanna get the fuck _outta_ there. There aren't many films that sustain black humor for their full length; _Dr. Strangelove_ and _The Hospital_ are about the only two successes I can think of right away. 


http://www.bakedziti.net/video/TheEnchantedThermos.mov

Michael O'Donoghue achieved a wonderful notoriety in the 1970s through his skill at dark, evil-oriented comedy. He was one of the breakout geniuses of the early _National Lampoon_, writing articles like "The Vietnamese Baby Book" and "Eloise at the Hotel Dixee." (In the latter, Eloise's mom has to relocate to a fleabag hotel filled with meth freaks, transvestites, and lead paint.) Lorne Michaels wanted some of the Lampoon's style, so he hired O'Donoghue as head writer on the original _Saturday Night Live_... where O'Donoghue wrote pieces like "Let's Kill Gary Gilmore for Christmas," the famous _Star Trek_ sketch, a long and sophisticated parody of _Citizen Kane_, and many more. He also turned up as an impressionist who imitated celebrities with long needles plunged into their eyes, and as the unsavory "Mr. Mike," whose "Least Loved Bedtime Stories" usually involved small furry animals meeting horrible ends.

(A few months ago, I wrote a blog entry describing the spectacle of John McCain having a stroke on national television. That was a riff on O'Donoghue's distinctive style.)

It's not hard to find recurring stuff in O'Donoghue's work. He love the decayed elegance of the 1920s and prewar Hollywood, and children's stories gave him an easy entry into really shocking material and the despoilation of children. Nazis were perhaps inevitably part of O'Donoghue's universe, and he was an early enthusiast of using fetish imagery in his work. And no matter how many Taschen reprints of Helmut Newton photos you've seen, nothing can prepare you for O'Donoghue's "Frederick's of Toyland" piece.

O'Donoghue himself was... well, okay, I'm basing this on having read about him since the mid-1970s, and on Dennis Perrin's biography, but don't blame Perrin for my comments. His first works were surreal experimental theater productions and articles in the _Evergreen Review_, making him a latecomer to the classic Beats. His first film script credit, the James Ivory film _Savages_, was a mannered sature that drew heavily on the work of Luis Bunuel as well as O'Donoghue's fascination with the lost elegance of the 1920s. (This was aroung the time John Waters was getting started, and there's a lot of similarities between his work and O'Donoghue's.) O'Donoghue always thought of himself as an artist and, as both artists and poseurs do, he encouraged people to see his eccentricities and erratic behavior as indications of his genius. (He was capable of towering rages, and frequently lost jobs when feeling insulted over some minor slight.) He could be generous with help and encouraging younger writers, but he also employed the Zen technique of psychologically berating his underlings to get them to push themselves further. 

In many cases, in worked. The _Lampoon_ and _SNL_ quickly took on the colors of O'Donoghue's style, and were long associated with his style of aggressive, black humor. But O'Donoghue's influence would fade as others would find their comedy voices, and O'Donoghue would grow restless or bored... or he'd fly into a rage over some minor slight, quit, and tell everyone else about the philistines who just didn't recognize his genius. In short, despite his considerable talent, O'Donoghue could be a major asshole. (Some of this may have been due to brain disorders; O'Donoghue suffered from migraines his whole life, self-medicating with Percodan and marijuana, and he died of a sudden brain hemorrhage at the age of 54.) 

So why am I writing this now? Well, when O'Donoghue upped-and-quit _SNL_, he had another project in the works. Lorne Michaels bankrolled a TV special that would have been O'Donoghue's own show. Titled _Mr. Mike's Mondo Video_, it was to be a parody of those exploitative "Mondo Cane" films of the early 1960s, where the filmmakers included "shocking" footage under the pose of anthropological interest. O'Donoghue's film-- hosted by his "Mr. Mike" character-- would depict a South Seas cult devoted to the worship of Jack Lord, an Amsterdam clinic where cats are taught to swim, lengthy discussions of Dan Aykroyd's webbed toes, affirmations from sexy women about their desire to date nerds and freaks, and whatever else O'Donoghue threw into the pot. 

The film was, by all accounts, exceedingly strange, but very poorly made: O'Donoghue was a writer, a radio producer, and a performer, but he couldn't direct film or video. The result was an ugly mess that NBC rejected, so the nascent New Line Cinema converted it to film and gave it a theatrical run. It's existed solely on the fringes of the fringes, hard to find outside of worn VHS copies. 

The 1980s weren't kind to O'Donoghue. He did well enough, getting screenwriting gigs here and there, but the only thing that bore his name as writer was _Scrooged_. And as I said, a brain henorrhage took him out in 1994, around the time he was talking to Quentin Tarantino about a collaboration. But, this was also a time when fringe culture seemed to have caught up with O'Donoghue. He'd modelled a TV show after a notorious exploitative travelogue, and once said he regarded serial killers as authentic American folk artists... and the 1990s gave is a fringe culture that resurrected modern primitives and "incredibly strange movies"' (remember ReSearch?), dwelled on serial killers and neo-Nazis and freaks, gave us a high-market fascinations with fetish gear and pulp-era low-down trash, from Tijuana bibles to Bettie Page and Irving Klaw. But Michael O'Donoghue had been there first. 

I've been a fan of O'Donoghue's for thirty years, and I've never seen _Mondo Video_. But Shout! Factory;s brought it our on DVD. I'll probably buy it and watch it once or twice. My taste for O'Donoghue's work has faded a little, but this was his one shot at injecting his work in its "purest form" into American video culture, so it'll be worth watching. It'll also be a nice way to revisit the days of midnight cult movies that _were_ dangerous, evil, shocking, circulated on beat-to-shit copies and probably best enjoyed while toking up... and great fun. 

Oh, by the way, here are the first five minutes of _Mr. Mike's Mondo Video_. And if the above hasn't been enough of a warning, well...

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