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Wednesday, November 13, 2019

THE ORIGINAL INGLORIOUS BASTERD: Heroes of a Generation

The people who bind themselves to systems are those who are unable to encompass the whole truth and try to catch it by the tail; a system is like the tail of truth, but truth is like a lizard; it leaves its tail in your fingers and runs away knowing full well that it will grow a new one in a twinkling.
— Ivan Turgenev, born in 1818


CLAUDIA ROSETT: Reagan’s Berlin Wall strategy was simple and could work today: ‘We win, they lose.’



Russia’s Greatest Napoleonic Reenactor (That’s A Thing, Apparently) Pulled Drunk Out Of River With His Girlfriend’s Arms In His Backpack

Having been fished out of the Moika River early Saturday morning with a backpack containing a woman’s severed arms, he was in the Mariinsky Hospital, still very much alive but recovering from hypothermia and facing a murder charge. – Washington Post




“I don’t know if I was fearless,” he added, “all I know is a few times, I disobeyed orders and I got rewarded for it.”
The OSS wanted spies who could think on the run. “The ideal OSS candidate was described as a Harvard PhD that could handle himself in a bar fight,” said Charles Pinck, a native of Massachusetts and president of the OSS Society. “The OSS needed people who could think and act independently.”
People like Martin Gelb.



'As Fascinating As a Revival or a Hanging'.


Laughter has no conscience. You can suppress it, blow your nose and leave the room but the internal convulsion remains. The comic impulse, at least in some of us, is overwhelming, more powerful even than weeping. It seems significant that seen from a distance, laughing can be indistinguishable from crying. So I offer no apology for getting yet another laugh or two out of H.L. Mencken’s “The Sahara of the Bozart,” first published on this date, Nov. 13, in 1917, in the New York Evening Mail, and collected inPrejudices, Second Series (1920). Its publication riled up many Southerners, including one classically minded critic who called Mencken a “modern Attila.” The essay is breathtakingly unfair and breathtakingly funny. Its unfairness seems beside the point:

“[The] civil war actually finished off nearly all the civilized folk in the South and thus left the country to the poor white trash, whose descendants now run it. The war, of course, was not a complete massacre; it didn’t kill them all. But those first-rate Southerners who actually survived were bankrupt, broken in spirit and unable to get along under the new dispensation, and so they came North.”

Until 2004, I was a lifelong Northerner. Observance of the Civil War centennial started when I was eight years old, and it turned me into a rabid Union patriot. I grew up watchingThe Beverly Hillbillies. I was never immune to Northern prejudice. My Southern stereotypes usually contained a nanoparticle of truth, much embellished by laziness, inexperience and popular culture.

Mencken’s essay was published on the cusp of the Southern literary renaissance. Think of Faulkner, Tate, Ransom (whose poems I’m reading again), Caroline Gordon, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Katherine Anne Porter, Robert Penn Warren; and later, Eudora Welty, Ralph Ellison, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Shelby Foote, Peter Taylor and Guy Davenport. Not all of these writers have worn well but the sheer number of them, all worthy of at least passing attention, is striking, though it probably wouldn’t impress Mencken. He writes:

“In such an atmosphere, it must be obvious, the arts cannot flourish. The philistinism of the emancipated poor white is not only indifferent to them; it is positively antagonistic to them. That philistinism regards human life, not as an agreeable adventure, but as a mere trial of rectitude.”

One of the first clichés I had to jettison when moving south was that Texas was a Western state – an assumption based, logically, on all the Westerns I had seen. Not so. It was part of the Confederacy. It seceded, and some would say it never truly rejoined the Union. It’s a Southern city, with Southern folkways.

I wondered if Mencken had ever visited Texas, and located a photograph of him in Houston in 1928, here to cover the Democratic National Convention. Of the four men in the picture (including Will Rogers), Mencken is the only one not smiling. The nominees were Governor Alfred E. Smith of New York for president and Arkansas Sen. Joseph T. Robinson for vice president. It was the first convention held in the South by either party since the Civil War. That November, Herbert Hoover trounced Smith by more than six million votes.

Mencken had written during the 1924 Democratic convention in New York City: “A national convention is as fascinating as a revival or a hanging. It is vulgar, ugly, stupid and tedious, to be sure, and yet there suddenly comes a show so gaudy and hilarious, so melodramatic and obscene, so unimaginably exhilarating and preposterous that one lives a gorgeous year in an hour.”


 HOW TO SERVE MAN:

The stories began to appear in the Soviet press in the autumn of 1921, each one more gruesome than the last. There was the woman who refused to let go of her dead husband’s body. “We won’t give him up,” she screamed when the authorities came to take it away. “We’ll eat him ourselves, he’s ours!” There was the cemetery where a gang of 12 ravenous men and women dug up the corpse of a recently deceased man and devoured his cold flesh on the spot. There was the man captured by the police after murdering his friend, chopping off his head, and selling the body at a street market to a local restaurant owner to be made into meatballs, cutlets, and hash. And then there was the desperate mother of four starving children, saved only by the death of their sister, aged 13, whom the woman cut up and fed to the family.
The stories seemed too horrific to believe. Few could imagine a hunger capable of driving people to such acts. One man went in search of the truth. Henry Wolfe, a high-school history teacher from Ohio, spent several weeks in the spring of 1922 traveling throughout Samara Province, in southeastern Russia, intent on finding physical evidence of cannibalism. In the district of Melekess, officials told him about a father who had killed and eaten his two little children. He confessed that their flesh had “tasted sweeter than pork.” Wolfe kept on searching, and eventually found the proof he had been looking for.
At first glance, it appears to be an unremarkable photograph of six individuals in winter dress: two women and four men, their expressions blank, betraying no particular emotion. But then our eyes catch sight of the grisly objects laid out across a wooden plank resting unevenly atop a pair of crates. There are two female heads, part of a rib cage, a hand, and what appears to be the skull of a small child. The adult heads have been cracked open, and the skulls pulled back. Along with human flesh, cannibals had feasted upon the brains of their victims.
Wolfe stands second from the right, surrounded by Russian interpreters and Soviet officials. There’s a faint look of satisfaction on his face at having accomplished his goal. Here, at last, was the incontrovertible proof he had set out to find.


 GOING FULL VIKING: Victim uses battle axe to fend off home invader. “There was a bloody mess everywhere. . . . Police K-9s followed the trail of blood to apprehend the suspect.”


GOOD NEWS IN BOLIVIA: Communist Stooge Evo Morales Forced To Resign By Protesters. “Tensions first flared on the night of the presidential election after the results count was inexplicably stopped for 24 hours. The final result gave Mr Morales slightly more than the 10-percentage-point lead he needed to win outright in the first round of the race. At least three people died during clashes that followed. Some uniformed police officers also joined the protesters. On Sunday, the Organization of American States, which monitored the elections, said it had found evidence of wide-scale data manipulation, and could not certify the result of the previous polls.”





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